Selected Shorts: Saints and Sinners

Sunday, October 23, 2011

“
There were always distances between them, a part of him cut off from her and from everyone. How different the two hims, the young invincible buccaneer and the man sitting opposite her, aging and dredged, everything locked inside him.

— Edna O'Brien, "Black Flower"

Master storyteller Edna O’Brien on muses on love, death, and regret in two stories and a twisty tale from Robert Coover condenses the meaning of life.

Edna O’Brien’s devastating stories are lyrical and direct, and, like her native Ireland, intertwine love, sex, war, and death in complex ways. On this program we present “Sinners,” read by “Sex in the City” alum Cynthia Nixon, and “Black Flower,” read by fellow writer Colum McCann.

In the first O’Brien tale, an aging landlady suspects her boarders of flagrant behavior, and mourns her own loss of passion. In “Black Flower,” O’Brien probes the charged relationship between a prison art teacher and a convicted IRA terrorist.

The program closes with a quirky work by American author Robert Coover. A man, “going for a beer,” winds up on the short road to the end of his life, in a bemused read by SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer.

The SELECTED SHORTS theme is David Peterson's “That's the Deal,” performed by the Deardorf/Peterson Group.

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Comments [1]

forbes perkins
from California

I'm afraid I can't stop listening to the lilting tragedy of Edna O'Brien's Black Flower. I think I'm as taken with the voice as I am with the language. The perfect storytelling and one of the best Selected Shorts I've yet to hear.

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